=jr050201.txt =jr050129 JOURNAL, FROM 29 Jan '05 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Online input, 10 Feb '05 -- 1 Adar I (Rosh Hodesh 2) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Re: IHR If unsourced sources in the Rjoman Catholic Church are that concerned about Pope John Paul's imparied function, they should contact a management firm and hire a business manager. For htis is one of the great spirtual leaders of our time. Steve Amdur, Campra, Switzerland (Moshav) Mevo Modi'in ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------- ( INPUT 6 FEB '05 -- CAMPRA -- OFFICIAL SUNUP DAY Further input 7 Feb '05 Further input 8 Feb '05 -- 29 Shvat walked up the Strada Romana and then up the road to Lucamagno yesterday -- no wind, maybe 5 below at Campra, nice sun in clear sky until late afternoon -- Maya was backup -- got back a bit after Ma'ariv without needing a flashlight -- hands still a bit chilled from wearing gloves, not mittens -- though Vanzetti had given me a pair of lost-and-found mittens -- ------------------------------------------------------------ Carnivale is coming. Gevalt! The Goyim will not eat raw pig -- proscrutio crudo -- or any othe rmeat they say for a month. This is a great mitzva for the goyim. How can they hold it -- To strenghten their vessels they dress as ogres and gorge and orge for all the preceeding month. ----------------------------------------------------------- En ce pays artificielE je mens un vie artificielle. In this artificialized land I lead an artificielle life. -------------------------------------------------------------- News Item -- 1789555 minuti alla fine del processo Today a 1:18 the sun came out shone through the windor on my door onto my bed that they took from bedroom and lit up my outside DVD so I took 2 photos with instant throwaway camera. I didn't got to the privy to piss like a gentleman for fear of missing it So I pee by the corner of imobilized caravan shack and the local birds start singing amd then the sun goes back in behind the ridgeline "and no birds sing"˙ at 1:25 . That night just after drak a grey wolf came with a white-tip tail and took the bread I had thrown outside. (Campra, 4 Feb '05) ------------------------------------------------------------------ Maureen Dowd, whose keen sense of satire has been blunted by outrage at the Bush Administrations mockery of human rights, describes a situation in which a female interrogator daubed a Muslim prisoner at Guantamo with apprent menstrual blood and had the water in his cell shut off, while shouting, Who sent you to flight school in Florida. Since Muslims (and for that matter, Jews) are obligated to cleanse themselves before prayer, especially of sexual fluids, and since in Muslim (and Jewish) tradition prayer is obligatory several times a day, the idea was that the prisoner would be broken by the conflict in religious obligation, and would be so humuliated by his inability to recite the prayers in the proper manner, that he would lose all self- respect and compliantly answer the interrogator's questions. Even if one supposes that a prisoner under or facing torture would answer questions honestly, it is not clear what relevance such answers would have had, especially if this was a prisoner captured three years ago. The 'ticking bomb' excuse, which applied to the Israel Bus 300 incident, has no applicability to prisoners arrested 3 years ago. Until the Bush Administration, and except in the Nazi genocide camps, prisoners were allowed freedom of religious expression. The Bush Administration in its sophmoric and unjustifiable attempts at interrogation. guided by a comic-book notion of Islam, has forced prisoners to violate their religious obligations, or to believe that they had done so. But in orthodox Judaism, and I assume in Islam, one is obligated only to try to do the best one can under the circumstances. Once in the month of Elul, an American Indian saw R. Zalman blowing a ram's horn shofar, and asked if he could blow it. R. Zalman said something like, are you clean. The Indian said, at home he would have taken a sweat bath before asking, but here at the hotel all he could do was take a shower. R. Zalman said something like, OK. The Indian blew it and said, 'Better than cow.' R. Zalman said something like, yes, that's what the Talmud says too. It is incumbent upon anyone who idemtifies to any extent with orthodox Judaism to oppose the Bush Administration's toleration, despite their hypocritc denials, of mockery of Islam. If these comic-book Crusaders do it to those who follow Islam, they would if circumstances change do it to Jews. Like the Nazis, the Bushies, with a ptit bourgeois base, have dredged up a winning electoral margin from a lumpenproletariat of thugs. This is a recurrence of American Facism. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Ah, Carnivale: Once a year the goyim abstain for a month from eating raw pig etc. But for the goyim this is a very great sacrifice so to console themselves they dress like ogres and orge for all the month before. ----------------------------------------------------------------- What Polisport has got is naught. 2 Feb '05 --------------------------------------------------------------- I seem to have been struck, as by a truck, with the onset of old age. My mind maintains the contrary; I walk around with the soul of a child, surprised by an incongruous body when I pass a mirror. ----------------------------------------------------------------- RE: IHT 1 Feb '05 (Revkin) (Applied philosophy” theory of meaning) Not yet semt Bush's lawyers claimed that because the term 'dangerous' had not been legalistically defined, the Kyoto Treaty obligating signers "to avoid 'dangerous' interference with the climate" (IHT 1 Feb '05 )Revkin) was unsound. But that notion resots on an implicit sophmoric (and sophistic) theory of meaning: To illustrate if not explicate: If I meet a green tiger I will recognize it and run, without insisting that first the beast be sufficiently defined to distinguish it from a large noisy ambulatory brocoli. In general, we exercise our intelligence against the world by pattern-recognition rather than instantiation of or deduction from definitions. In general, rules, including definitions, come into play only in problematic situations; that was one of Wittgenstein's points, and Austin's too. To demand a rule in a non-problematic ("ordinary") context is either to speak a refined sort of nonsense (as Ryle pointed out, to excess) or misleadingly to imply that one is speaking of an extraordinary situation (thus the Wittgensteinian gambit of contriving illustrative situations to illustrate the proper placement of an inproper phrase). Realworld definitions are definitive only in limiting cases; and, except in law, are descriptive, not prescriptive. Men of goodwill -- an apparent rarity in the Bush administration -- act primarily on the basis of 'common sense' not definitions. The notion of 'common sense' needs much explication; it is basic to a theory of knowlege, something like Wittgenstein's notion of 'bedrock'. 'Common sense' is what everyone from Einstein to an idiot relies on to get on with the ordinary things of ordinary life; 'common sense' cannot be 'dis'd & dismissed' (disregarded with disrespect) as the crude buffooneries of disposabble yokels. My compliments to the coffee bean. Now with global warming there is a further parameter of problematicity: the recognition of criteria for saying that there has been 'dangerous climate change' (the triggering phrase in teh Kyoto accord which mandates government action) depends upon evolving scientific knowlege. ------------------------------------------------------------------ En ce pays artificiele je mens un vie artificielle. :Remembering blue afternoon light on Iowa snowfields, seen from a car window while hitch-hiking from Oberlin College to Chicago during winter vacation, ca. 1959 -------------------------------------------------------------- Bellinzona has large plazas with winter sun and public benches. You can stand in the sun or sit on the benches because the benches are not in the sun so the sun is not on the benches. (1 Feb '05) ---------------------------------------------------------------- Sketch of a Miffed Homo Maybe (after Klee I'd wish): or A Jew on Holiday Regarding his Betters: MR. SURELY the WAITER should tip me. Like a sommelier manque he twists his hand over the almost-applejuice and pours, uninvited. As if it were grand banquet he reaches over & whisks everything away as soon as anyone's finished eating without even waiting for the echo or Indian belch. The ptit dejeuner with its little pieces of processed cheese each wrapped in silver paper with a pretty printed picture of what it is or isn't is hearty enough for picking paper flowers by. (Strada Romana, Campra, 7 Feb '05) --------------------------------------------------------------- I think often of my teacher and ask what he would do in my situations and the answers come back 'Not what you're think of, Buddy.' ------------------------------------------------------------------ The USA Ship of State is swamped. It may right itself, but it will do so very slowly. As in the Vietnam War. By '64 as head of the NYC SPU I concluded that the USA had to leave Vietnam, because regardless of ethics the USA could not win that war, otherwise it would have done so. In '65 LBJ escalated to continual bombing of North Vietnam, with a oontrived Gulf of Tonkin incident as excuse -- I think it was Seymour Hirsch, writing for the New York Times, who exposed that at the time, but low-key rather than as a cause celebre, so one had to almost read between the lines of his articles. Subsequently LBJ resigned from campaigning for a second term, and Nixon wonn because the Democratic Party liberal base reacted with repugnance to Humphrey's collaboration, dramatized by Jerry Rubin's Yippies in militant Chicago demonstrations (exacerbated by Daley's Police Riot). And then Kissinger with his ham-handed Realpoliitik continued the slaughter of Vietnamese in an attempt to give Nixon a charade behind which he could "declare a victory and bug out". Then as with Bush Jenior's Comic Book Iraq War (for to little Bush, war is no more real than a comic book, as he plays Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy, wearing a bomber jacket, a cowardly braggart Commander-in-Chief who would piss in his pants and run at the first shots), the U.S. Legislature, the Senate no less than the House, abdicated responsibility to "advise and consent" on foreign policy. Then it was only Wayne Morse and Ernst Gruenig (Jewish, from the New York Ethical Culture Society) who stood up and opposed it. And now Kerry self-righteously votes against Rice for Secretary of State, maybe the only honest professional in the Bush Administration now that Powell, who saved the world from Bush's madness during the first administration, has retired, to die of his illness I suppose. If the USA is saved from the Bush American Facist takeover, it will have been by its Negros. Oddly, for we have done nothing to deserve that. Well, they are a noble people. I once wanted to say, Servants, in the best Christian sense of that term. But Ciel did not want to hear that, and I don't know where she is now, and would like to do whatever I can, in life or after it, to help her and make ammends. "Say what we me mean, not what we ought to say." (Kent, in King Lear) In a sense, I feel that my life after the breakdown on Rodos was given back to me on probation. I had all but vowed that I would not live past 60; and then when that came on close I didn't want to pay off and so I said, well, I will live but will dedicate the rest of my life to service -- ah, negotiation -- and then when that came close I said, but there is so much I've wanted in life and never done for myself, and what I really want is to do that -- little things, like retiring to Maine, or marrying a few people -- well, that was a few years ago, one ages, unexpectedly, finds that intolerable, and then finds it just one more aspect of life -- So anyhow, here I am sitting in Switzerland -- you know, lounging arounding a roaring fire in the ski-lodge watching the ski-bunnies in their decoltee bringing me hot buttered rum -- well anyhow, I really do go into town and buy Swiss watches -- just so Ag can't say she can't take a bit of occasional tzdaka because I should be spending money on myself -- shucks, I got a gold Swiss watch recently -- rather elegant -- almost enough gold in it to make a stout earing for a medium-sized mosquito, but who notices -- -- leading a life of service, sort of, aand it's not half-bad -- shucks, the pay is darned good -- I mean, a half-month winter vacation in the Swiss Alps, with all the hiking I can stand, and a number of beautiful women to talk to -- and my own personal boiler to make hot water whenever I want, without having to pay 3 dollars for a little cup of it at the Restorante -- I put the boiler in the kitchen of Zenith Refugio, and fouund an old Zenith casette sticker and dedicated the boiler to Mansur (Horst Ziegelsky, z'lb) because he and I used to be the ones who got up early and went into the kitchen and made the cook crazy by boiling up some coffee before everyone got up -- we didn't really do it to make the cook crazy, that was only a fringe benefit -- some cooks you really want to make crazy, because they take over the kitchen, which really belongs to everyone -- at New Buffalo, we all used to hang out in the kitchen in winter, it was the only warm room -- except for the families with babies who had to keep their rooms warm -- once Bob almost had an orgy in his room -- maybe he did after I left -- and Travis was there, and seemed inclined, but I liked her, and wanted to do it personally if we could do it -- and so I never did -- Once there was a scheduled orgy in the dug-out circle -- not such a bright idea, since we also had prayer meetings there, but anyhow, this was between times -- so I had supper, beans and cornbread I suppose, and was waiting around, but nothing was happening, and it even got to be past nine-thirty, which was well past my bedtime, and still nothing was happening, and so I said to myself, well, if they want to have an orgy they can darned well do it without me -- a few days later I asked and someone said, oh, Shiva rolled around in the dust with a few people -- some time after that she Found Jesus, and so then I remarked to her, I guess I should have waited in line, and she answered, a bit sadly, There was never any line -- But I digress. Only Mailer has displayed the grotesque perversion of the American Dream. As in 'Why are We in Vietnam.' Because what has happened is so neurotic than one can almost go mad trying to chart that labarynth. More notes: for the legislature follows the Presidency like a sniveling dog. The Bushies are bunch of children, they antagonize Europe for no reason. And now TIME, in its Person of the Year issue -- well, George Bush Jr. is no man -- and George Senior was a portable figurehead clown, someone said he headed the CIA "like a Queen of England" -- and Rumsfeld too seems a Queen -- "killer fruits" as Terry Souther(?) termed sadistic old closet homos like J. Edgar Hoover -- and Leary said, no man should be a political leader who is past the age of procreation -- -- so TIME through a slit in its log-cabbin facade reveals that Bush lives on, loves to, thrives on, hate. The Bushies are a bunch of children: they antagonize Europe for no reason. Bush's first act after being elected President was to repudiate the Kyoto accord, and nothing has more antagonized the civilized society excmplified by Europe, and I think that was just little Bushie's way of flipping Daddy the Bird -- Nixon was neurotic, but he still believed in affecting normalcy. And Daddy Bush is a Goofus, but a Goofus who Fakes It, so he can be managed. But Bushie is of this new amoral generation, that disdains the civilization it lives off. Cha-cha-cha. I'm rather glad in some ways that I most likely won't have to live through all that. I mean really, at my age one should have a civiilized world into which to retire; this chaos is for the young, as Zelazny almost says in his sci-fi parable. But I digress. It's 04:38 and my fingers are warming. More chicken-scratch notes, most of which I can read a week or so after wtiting them: What Saddam really wanted was not money, nor even power per se, but honor. A coin that costs nothing, and the USA would not buy him with it. Heaven save us from pious Protestants. --------------------------------------------------------------- Can't keep lox fresh once it's been opened -- it gets oily and forgets the streams it once swam in -- I paid SF 5.80 for 100 grams in the Olivone grocery store, they cut if off a large slab - - no way Jose, even with a dash of lemonn it was barely ok -- have to go back to Israel to get good little vacuum-wrapped packets -- rather a round-about way to the streams of Washington State, or Oregon -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Like I say, I don't much mind writing this stuff -- better than TV, especially where I don't have TV -- when I sleep in hotel rooms I keep it on all night in case a pretty woman appears in her flimsies -- I mean, wouldn't anyone keep the door open to that option, even if it's only a virtual door to a virtual option -- As Albert the Alligator used to say, Amazing how a good looking man looks handsome in whatever he happens to put on -- (that's Walt Kelly, Pogo comics, 1950's -- rather popular with the intelligentsia -- one of the few to take on Tail Gunner Joe McCarthy -- as 'Simple Joe Malarky', if memory serves -- And Al Capp had Jubliation T. Cornpone, and really did create Dogpatch, which was a wonderful whimsical fantasy world -- but Capp had a shriveled up left hand from a World War II energy, and become embittered and cranky in old age, slagging at Joan Baez -- and my mother said, and others too, what a voice of an angel -- a nothing little song like Finario -- which Bob Dylan rightly parodied -- or 'Al Presso Numero Nuevo' -- or 'Bachante Brassilies *9 (Villa Lobos) -- and she gives it such pierciing poignancy -- I went up to the Cauman's for the New Year's Day Buffet, that was a year I was at Columbia, or maybe after I had dropped out of Grad School there to work in the SPU office -- and Sammy Cauman said, Steve, you must try the lox, it will break your heart -- In their rented house in Cambridge, I was a child then, he did a grand mural, The Pleasure Isles, or some such, which I did not like -- no doubt my father took a photo of it, or maybe also someone else did, but it would be a fluke if that survived -- They must have later got money from somewhere, for that apartment overlooking Riverside Drive, at about 116th St., yuppies would kill -- it must be worth millions now -- and Leigh Cauman, who editted the Columbia Journal of Philosophy, published at last a book on formal logic, in old age -- I once showed her an essay I wrote, while I was in Columbia grad school -- Columbia has a certain style you know, with those old buildings and the weekly t tea served by faculty wives -- as Finemann recalls -- "Lemon or cream , Mr. Finemann" -- "Oh -- both." "Surely you're joking, Mr. Finemann." A kid from Brooklyn who happened to be as geeat am inventor as ever has been -- abstracting his ingenuity into theoretical physics, and also into applied physics -- they put him on the panel to investigate the explosiion of the Space Shuttle, which turned out to have been caused by a defective rubber O-ring -- and everyone else, army and civilian contractors, busy trying to cover up -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Why I will maybe go down the mountain and on down to the train station and down the river valley and up the next valley and under the mountain and back up by the steam to Andrmatt today: Polisport has Internet. Sign says so. But when I ask in August. The computers are long gone. So I come back in January and so do the screens three on a CPU tree. But Polisport is closed for vacation for 10 days. So OK. Stay loose Moose. Keep cool fool. I save up all this junk like a well-built dunghill and walk back down the mountain over crusted snow first thing in in the week -- but not Monday -- Olivone is closed on Mondays Stop by Tuesday -- computers don't log on -- "Try tomorrow." stop by late afternoon and become a member. DSL no less. Owner is there smoking many cigarettes with her cronies. Says they're taking the computers out until mid-month because Carnivale starts Sunday and someone might spill beer down the slits of the keyboard. ---------------------------------------------------------------- The preacher asks grace over a bowl of soup. I get a hit that maybe once we fought together maybe in the Crusades the real ones, not on earth. Maybe she was the king. Sometimes when the sun strikes gold and silver I can barely glance at her. Note: Tom o' Bedlam's song, as quoted in Kenneth Patchen, The Journal of Albion Moonlight (New Directions (paperback), ca. 1962): "I have no slept since the Crusades 'till then I never waked 'till the roughish boy of love where I lay me found and stripped me naked. While any sing Any feeding -- meat drink or clothing -- Come dame or maid, be not afraid poor Tom will injure nothing." ---------------------------------------------------------------- Ten days in the Alp of Shadow No sun, ten degrees below with wind Get down to the River Valley train station Sun comes out Sit on thte steps drink isotonic with potatoe chips. Swiss comes out behind me says something goes back in Look back and see$in hand made graphic 'Don't sit on the steps -- Privato' (Biasca 1 Feb 05) :Swiss Cookoo Clock ----------------------------------------------------------------- Re: IHT 7 Feb '05: Rice's call for "the emergence of a democratic Palestinian state" sounds like George Bush Jr.'s Neverland. First of all, Hamas would probably win democratic elections, since it has a reputation for social concern and financial integrity. Second, any Palestinian state would probably quickly deteriorate into a theocratic tyranny and a haven for terrorism. --------------------------------------------------------------- They keep offering me lodgings iwth a 50-yard winter midnight dash to the privy. If there ain't a halacha against it, there ought to be. Can one put a chamber-pot in the same room as a siddur. Respect for elders can be overdone, but should include, without having to be asked, a certain accomodation to cranky plumbing, ------------------------------------------------------------------ I slip and fall in the 3-star hotel 2-inch high plastic curtained shower stall, floored in porcelain smooth as ball-bearings. The bathroom floor is almost as slippery, especially when wet, and the wall made of tile hard enought to crack a coconut upon it, as I almost do. The bathroom is so small, one can't but hit head on wall if one falls. The rim of the shower stall is so low -- its made by KALDEWEI -- less than a handspan high, and sloping outward -- that one easily falls over it. I thiink I slipped on shampoo, from the plastic pack of shampoo that I broke open. The rim is about a handbreath high. The size of the stall is about 2 ells square -- elbow-to-fingertip . The whole thing is designed only for ease of cleaning, in disregard of all safety considerations. there is nothing to hold onto , unless one grapss the pole that holds the shower cable, which I am still grasping as I continue my shower on the floor until it occurs to me that this is not quite rational. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Sent, JP: Israel can manage its own coexistence with Iran. Israel must not let itself be used as a proxy by the Cheney/Bush Administration. And it is despicable that US torturers wrapped their victims in Israeli flags. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Sent, IHT: Given the horrors perpetrated by the Bush Administration in its quasi-military detention facilities, I do not see how anyone can in good conscience to pay U.S. income tax. ---------------------------------------------------------------- The Allies in World War II never even attempted to liberate the Nazi genocide camps; those were merely abandoned by the Germans to advancing armies after almost all European Jews had been murdered. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Re: IHT 2 Feb '05 (Klein) Not sent. If a tape ostensibly from Osama bin Lsden, made public a few days for the U.S. election, helped swing the election to Bush, one must ask where that tape come from. For it seems that bin Laden was killed, probably by Pakistani secret police, as he fled from the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. And it is not obvious that it was bin Laden, rather than maybe agents provacateur, who directed the destruction of the World Trade Center. -------------------------------------------------------------- The Poet Wonders if it may be nearly time to Go Home: Today I got a bed in my workroom. They took it from my bedroom. (Campra, 31 Jan '05) --------------------------------------------------------------- A fitful sleeper now I skim not surf the TV waves and pause at the ladies of the night. (I find Rossini but it ends.) She rubs her pussy for TV. In sympathy I tickle my dingle. (Hell, blame Rembrandt.) In this world of shadows someone finds a bit of nice or acts it. By daybreak we part as old friends. 13 below sun not up yet Cousin George is first at work to serve lukewarm coffee bitter, with a dash of milk. Ya Habibi. Grazie, walk outside, savour the clean cool air, flip it on the pisspile and pour my own which isn't any better. For that price I keep the cup. 7 Feb '05 -------------------------------------------------------------- To Senator Joseph Liberman (D-CT), Senate Office Building, Washington D.C. Best wishes to you. I was surprised and a bit shocked to read that you voted to confirm that wretch Gonzales as Attorney-General. I hope that you will make amends by becoming outspoken in opposition to the Bush Administration's use of torture and other degrading practices in its misdirected quaisi-military interrogations. I need not point out to you that (although I cannot cite the halachic opinions) torture is contrary to Jewish values. --------------------------------------------------------------- I take to bed two cartoon books: 'Prostituta Millardara' amd TIME: 'George Bush Jr. -- Person of the Year'. Which one's the porn. "'He doesn't talk to a woman as if he's talking to a woman.'" (TIME 3 Jan '05 (Klein), quoting Senator Kay Hutchinson=) "Bush ... has always been a punk at heart." (Ibid.) "'He likes being hated. It lets him know he's doing the right thing.'" (Ibid. , quoting an anoymous 'Bush adviser') "With The New York Times, you have to read baetween the lines, but at least there are lines to read between." (Dave McReynolds, ca. 1964) +-"Nowaday when you ask for a hunded-an-hour whore, they send you in an ad man.-+" (Lenny Bruce(? or maybe Herbert Gold) +-1958 '+-'='more or less'='wavy equals sign' ---------------------------------------------------------------- It appears that the Bush Administration's torture policy originates with George Bush. The U.S. military opposed it (through lawyers for the Joint Chiefs of Staff ), and would not defer to anyone but the Constitutional Commander-in-Chief. And both Bush and Gonzales are reported as having used the rather odd phrase 'leaning forward'. Gonuales used it (Newsweek 17 Jan '05 (Isikoff) --NO; probably Newwseek, possibly TIME or IHT: no other sources possible ) in pressing the Justice Department for a legal opinion justifying torture. Bush used it (TIME 'Person of the Year' Issue, 3 Jan '05) "Sometimes I look through that teleprompter and see reactions„" te reacalls. „I m not going to chracterize what the reactions are, but nevertheless it causes me to want to lean a little more forward into the prompter, if you know what I mean.") in an innocuous but logically prior context, to describe staring through his telepompter to note who reacated negatively to his remarks. Also, Gary Trudeau has remakred that Bush was rather a sadist as a college student. TIME (3 Jan '05, 'Person of the Year' issue) quotes an anonymous 'Bush adviser' he remarks: "'He likes being hated. It lets him know he's doing the right thing." Well, this does suggest a parnoid personality -- possibly a victim of beatings as a child, whose character development was arrested in adolescence as a parnoid personality that acts-out when possible in socially_tolerated gestures of sadism. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Book Review, Bryan Forbes, author of The Endless Game: The Distant Laughter. William Collins Sons Ltd. 1972 Writes with awesome ineptitude matched only by his self-esteem. Apparently a roman-a-clef (that's a new word I learned at Age 60), A Director who made a few good movies, the latest being The League of Gentlemen, which was probably good. None of which shows in this book, apparently an inside story of a movie he made that was never released. A book to read in a cold windy winter; it fits nicely in the cracks and carried without loss of continuity to the privy when need be. Well, I have just started, and rather hope I don't finish, his short story, "In at the Death", (1977, first published in "the 13th Ghost Book", London; "Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine", 1978. The should be required reading, the sort of thing they force on adolescents in state-run high school, in place of Wordsworth's "Pap for a Picnic". It seems to be a very accurate, very detailed exposition of all the reasons not to commit suicide. ("Bugger 'Young Werther'.") (And for some reason, today I am struck by a book title, "For Coloured Girls who have considered suicide when the Rainbow is Enuf". (The best title I know is "Peter Quince at the Clavier" (Wallace Stevens). To paraphrase Marilyn Strauss Lidov, speaking of a Beethoven run , 2 slow and then 6 faster with ralentado, as played by Schnabel: 'If I could do that just once, I'd retire.')) The first line is, "It„'s hard not to believe in ghosts when you are one." He seems to hit all the points, and to get it right: (1) the petulant self-indulgent romantic egotism that leads one toward the suicide, (2) the immediate revelation, an instant too late, that suicide was not what one wanted after all, and the most frustrating difficulty of attempting to unhang oneself (3) the extreme unpleasantness of hanging onself (Dorthy Parker put that all most neatly: I once read some idiot critic who with tedious repetition insinuated that she was to blame for having opted instead to die untidily a good time afterwards.) (3) The fact that suicide changes absolutely nothing except the state and place of one's body -- so the protagonist, having hung himself in his bedroom, stays right there watching his increasingly even more boring existence go on -- while all who wronged him cart away his corpse and, rather than flagellating themselves with grief and guilt, remark with poor wit and bad dialgoue on what an idiot he was. (Well, that's how I'd write the end of this story, rather than reading it. ) ------------------------------------------------------------------- And Shevki said I once knew some thieves in Istanbul. In honor of Ramadan they abstained from stealing. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Well, so is Jesus; but the Christians seem to have made the best of a bad deal. Note: Cf. PVK: Apr: "A defeat which avers itself to be a victory" -- "the greatest victory the world has known. ----------------------------------------------------------------- BOOK REVIEW:John Gardner, The Man from Barbarossa, James Bond's Latest Adventure, Hoder and Stoughton Ltd 1991 A passable potboiler, tho Ian Fleming he ain't. Besides bedding athletic young women, his James Bond shows none of the Playboy_JFK__class, practically an arriveste's instant guide to Better Brands, that graced Ian Fleming's bond & spawned so many romanticly escapist movies. Nor the passes of witty dialgoue, nor the ironic self-mockery that so graced JFK. But one gladly does without Flemings's little scences of sadism. ------------------------------------------------------------------- To JP, not yet sent: GEORGE BUSH WILL FIGHT UNTIL THE LAST JEW IS DEAD: Israle must not let itself be used as a proxy by the Cheny/Bush Administration. Israle can manage its onw detente with Iran. and it is despicable if not insidious that US torturers wrapped their victims in Israeli flags. Notes: Cf. Slippery Jim Baker, at the end of the first Bush Regime: "F__k the Jews, they didn't vote for us." ------------------------------------------------------------------ Given the horros perpetrated by the Bus Administration in its military and quasi_military detention facilities, I do not see how any U.S. citizen can in good conscience continue to pay U.S. income tax. ----------------------------------------------------------------- The Nazi genocide camps were never 'liberated', nor was any attempt made to do so; they were abandonned to advancing Allied forces when the German army collapesed; and only after most of European Jewery had been murdered and its culture nearly destroyed. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Prophetic Prophylactic Pelophone: Amidst daydreams of a last new affair I grab my Handy push appropriate buttons and get in my ear 'Your combox has not yet been activated.' in a reproachful woman's tones. Notes: "Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras." (Les Demoiselles d'Avignon) ('La Marseilles' is such a stupid national anthem it makes even 'The Star Spangled Banner' seem grammatic. For starters, an unarmed militia is not about to form itself into battalions.) "No one quite as breezy as / quite as free and easy as / old Tireseas" (Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet. Cf. T.S. Eliot: "But oh, oh, oh that Shakespearian rag. It's so elegant. So intelligent.'" At which point I would hear a single squish of a muffled pedal-cymbal, an affect popular only in 1920's pop. Ellright, I think it was, points out that there really was a 'Shekespearian rag' in pop music of the time. --------------------------------------------------------------- I'm inspir'd by divine afflatus, or a cosmic fart ----------------------------------------------------------------- At first glance, privitization of social security looks like the biggest scam since Teapot Dome. It's hard to imagine why else the Bushies would be so eager to push it through. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Yesterday Vanzetti gave me a baseball-style cap with the Campra logo on the front (which includes a few symbols of humans hiking, ski-ing, etc.), and 'Banca Raffeissen' on the back. Is it kosher to wear it for Shabat devening, for weekday davening, for general use on weekdays, for general use on Shabat- It is a minhag "that has the force of halacha" for males of bar mitzva age and over to cover the head -- at all times, for orthodox; when davening and saying a bracha, for non-orthodox. One need not cover the head with a kippa; a hat or cap will do, even a paper napkin. So I have seen at the kotel, where some very knowlegeable and strict observors are present. But what if the cap has writing on it. I have seen no objection to that at the kotel. And if the writing were obscene -- that is excluded by secular as well as religious norms banning indecent display. What of those little images of people. That does not strike me as problematic, tho I'm not sure why not. Maybe because 'thou shalt make no images' is generally disregarded, except inside a Bet Knesset. But is the kotel not a Bet Knesset -- an outdoor one. Well, yes and no. What of someone who enters a Bet Knesset with a shirt on which there is an Izod Alligator, or whatever. That is disregarded. Judy once made me a kippa of some excellent fabric with intricate patterns in subtle colours. It so happened that on the top of the kippa was the image of a little wine demon or some such, grinning up at heavcen. Judy hadn't even noticed. So it couldn't be worn. But what of those screaming orange caps that tourist groups wear to meet the requirement, and also be more easily herded. You would never walk into a Bet Knesset wearing one, that's a matter of minimal taste, respect for the feelings of the normal human beings whom one occasionally passes by if not encounters. Surely its not decorous, and it that sense, not snias. For snias is much more than sexual modesty. I mean, you don't walk into a house of prayer dressed like Bozo the Clown even with a black kippa, unless its Purim. Or into a Church, unless its Carnivale. A young woman of Israel can be modest even in a string bikini. Once a young man from Israel walked into the old synagogue of Rodos, on Rosh HaShana I think but maybe Yom Kippur, wearing if I recall one of those tourist T-shirts illustrating the possible postions for an imaginary sex olympics. I handed him a tallit, and he stood attentively and respectfully with it draped over his T-shirt while we needed him for the minyan. The minature graphics on my Campra cap depict less provacative activities. My problem is not with them, but with the Banca Rafeissen logo, without images nor graphics, on the back of the cap. It is an advertisment for the company that paid for the caps. Whatever greed may be imputed to Jews, one finds, not in Israel, but in Switzerland, albeit genteelly. This is no Bleinstein with a Cigar, its teatime in an avalanche for 3 dollars an ounce. My problem is not that it's an advertisement, but that its an advertisement for a bank. What if it were for Mortie's Glatt Kosher Extra-Large Hotdogs, or for Abie's Scabies Cream. The chaste bank (ah, the chastity of facisim, good clean ethnic cleansing) is more problematic than those gross alleviators of lower appetites. Can't daven in a cap with an ad for bank; at least not on Shabat, when we don't evem discuss money, and shouldn't think of it. Some synagogues call you for an aliyah, and then have a passage in the siddur where you say you will give thus and so much tzdaka for the bracha -- bli nider, of course. I don't see how they can do it. And worse, one doesn't buy hrachot. Why can't I daven on weekdays in a cap with the name of a bank on it. It is acceptable and in many shuls meritorious, even expected, to give tzdaka during mincha amida -- the holiest prayer -- as a tangible demonstration of one's wish to repent (the pushke is passed around, and demonstratively shaken, during the prayer for forgiveness in the repetition of the amidah). But tzdaka is a mitzva -- albeit one that can't be done on Shabat -- whereas dealing with money is malaka.. We don't do malaka during even weekday davening, tho on weekdays this is not on the level of an halachic prohibition. That should include answering cellphones, except in case of pekude nefesh -- our Radbash always has his cellphone on, his call is the Lone Ranger theme from the William Tell overture. Most synagogues have a graphic asking that cellphones be turned off, though many diregard it. So ok, maybe I can't wear my Banca Rafeissen cap into shul, but what about the rest of the time. A Jew must cover his head whenever saying a bracha. That means, in particular, when davening and when saying grace_after_meals. The non-orthodox put on hats for those occasions. I have even seen a non-orthodox kiss his borrowed kippa upon taking it off after davening, as the orthodox would for their tallit. So the orthodox wear a hat at all times, becuase you never know when lightning will strike -- ie, when am evemt will occur for which you must, in orthodox practice, say a bracha. Surely a bracha should be kept free of malakot -- I mean, we don't say, heaven be praised and P.S. Eat at Joe's -- or Glory be for the wonders of Nature and P.S. Bank at Pinchpenny's -- But one who engaged in some degrading activity -- or dressed in some degrading fashion, maybe for material gain -- is he/she not to say the bracha -- Im gemeral, he/she not merely may but must -- It is a trick of the devil to say, oh, I'm just not holy enough right now to do that mitzva -- I mean, someone is drowning or starving and I say, I wish I could help you, but I'm not in a clean enough state to merit the blessing of doing that mitzva But there are limits -- eg, one does not say a bracha in a privy, not if one's private parts are exposed -- But why is there not a bracha for loving, procreative sex -- (Woody Allen touches on this, but only from the standpoint of a mocker, so his idea is worthless,) Ok, can I wear my Banca Rafeissen cap during the grace after meals -- praise heaven for sustaining all liviing creatures, and bless our tables, and P.S. you get excellent interest rates on fixed deposits at this bank -- As R. Shlomo would say, it just doesn't go. Everyone knows, you don't discuss business at meals, you discuss torah. That's just good manners, not to discuss business at meals. So the 'business lunch' is only for goyim. Only the Romans could have invented the 'business lunch' -- get him sleepy with pasta and loopy with vino and then pull out the contract. I mean, only a sucker would go to a business lumch -- he buys you lamb chops but you're the lamb. If you want to do business, stay lean and mean, keep standing up - - they always insist that it's only goodd manners for you to sit down -- usually in a position unsuited for meditation, so all your brains fall down into your ass and you can't even stand up when the swordsman bursts through the curtain -- and don't eat or drink anything except black coffee -- And when you travel, travel light and hungry -- don't eat if you don't know where you'll poop the refuse -- "don't get caught with your pants down" -- The first thing you need to know before you get on a white horse is that the bad guys don't play by the rules -- otherwise they wouldn't be bad guys -- and also, they rarely say, hi, we're the bad guys -- So who but a fool would do business after food and drink -- Once I heard Abe Fortas at UNM -- this was just after LBJ had norminated him to be Chief Justice, and instead Nixon's team found some financial impropriety in his past -- heck, his career was built on them, how else could he have ridden on LBJ's coat-tails, but so what, he was still a strong liberal -- and so he was in effect not merely blocked from being Chief Justice, but forced to quit the Supreme Court -- So I went to his talk -- things were simpler in Albuquerque in 1966 -- hoping to hear a scathing expose of what had really happened -- and he started off by saying something like, he had thought of saying certain things, but after such good food and drink ---- I mean, a lot of history was misdirected by a slab of fatty beefsteak with a fifth of well-aged claret -- So can I wear my Banca Hat to lunch -- no, for brachot are our communion with Heaven. That's my analysis of the back of my hat. But what of the front of it. Am I not then advertising Campa. No, I am only boasting of my place. As I can -- and must -- state my name to Heavne in davening -- when called to the Torah -- so too my place, which is part of my name -- the shetl of Amdur, or the region of Mezrich -- great hasidic names, which one may with honor offer to Heaven -- But slow down bikerbilly -- the name by which one is called to the Torah is only personal name and patrynomic, not place -- OK, that's all I have to say about my hat today -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- 13 below here gusting to maybe 40 MPH too cold to piss without getting stuck skinny couple stops by the Restorante look for maps Plump George sells them cups of coffee they look at a tourist map I say hello but they don't want to talk say they're going up to Passeo del Uomo, or maybe Rosella wherever that is on skis I buy a shot of kirsch I didn't need but they don't want to talk so I go back to my computer and start writing this I finish up the kirsch and take the glass back but they're gone and George is sitting at their table in shirtsleeves and apron -- he could walk through a door without turning the handle -- sits there eating a plump lunch with his crew. :Jonah at Nineveh the Morning After: -------------------------------------------------------------- Rumsfeld & Co. argue that some detanees are too dangerous to be released. That's hotwash. Having been identified as terrorists, they can be easily tracked. If they are released and attempt to resume terroirst activities, they will only betray other would-be terrorists. T he USA claims t ha tsome detainees cannot be tried for fear of revealing informants, directly or circumstantially. Israel has also used this argument, with more need and more basis, to justify 'administrative detention'. But adequate safeguards to protect informants from retribution can be bult into a fair military trial, albeit with some curtailment of civilian standards of due process of law. Eg court-appointed miltary lawyers not necesarily of the defandant's choice, and excluding the defendant, press, and public from certain portions of the trial. ----------------------------------------------------------------